I've been watching NYC runners get shut out of races they've run for years, and it's fascinating from a product management perspective.
NYRR's 9+1 program was brilliant when the NYC Marathon had 47,000 applicants. Now with over 165,000 entries for 50,000 spots, the system is creating artificial scarcity in races that used to be open registration. Runners who dutifully completed their nine qualifying races are finding themselves locked out of the very events that got them into running.
This reminds me of how we've handled customer success at scale. When I was managing smaller SE teams, our "white glove" approach worked perfectly. Every customer got dedicated time, custom solutions, and felt special. But as we scaled to enterprise clients, that same approach created bottlenecks and frustrated exactly the customers we were trying to serve.
The lesson isn't that growth is bad – it's that systems built for 50,000 break at 165,000. NYRR needs tiered access, lottery systems, or geographic quotas. We need to design for scale from day one, not retrofit solutions onto overwhelmed infrastructure.
I'm curious how this plays out. Will NYRR evolve their system, or will frustrated runners create their own alternatives? In tech, when incumbent platforms can't serve demand, someone usually builds a better mousetrap.
What legacy systems in your organization are buckling under growth pressure?